Robert pindyck biography

Pindyck grew up in Mamaroneck, New York, and in 1962 graduated from Mamaroneck High School.
Robert S. Pindyck is the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor of Economics and Finance in the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He is also a Research Associate.
Robert Stephen Pindyck is an American economist, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor of Economics and Finance at Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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About

Economics, Finance and Accounting

Robert Pindyck is the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Ltd. Professor in Finance and Economics and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Pindyck’s most recent research focuses on economic policies related to rare disasters, such as those that would severely affect the entire U.S. or world economies. Examples include possible but low-probability catastrophic outcomes from global warming or nuclear terrorism. At issue is how such low-probability but extreme outcomes should affect current policy, for example, in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. He also has continued to work on irreversible investment decisions, the role of network effects in market structure, and the behavior of commodity prices.

Pindyck is the co-author of Investment Under Uncertainty (Princeton University Press, 1994), which demonstrates that the traditional “net present value” rule for capital investment decisions can lead to wrong answers since it ignores the irreversibility of most investment decisions and the option of del

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Intro. [Recording date: February 23, 2022.]

Russ Roberts: Today is February 23rd, 2022 and my guest is author and economist Robert Pindyck of MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. This is his second appearance on the program. He was last here in August of 2013, talking about climate change. His latest book is Climate Future: Averting and Adapting to Climate Change. Bob, welcome back to EconTalk.

Robert Pindyck: Thanks. It's nice to be here.

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Russ Roberts: Now, this is a deeply, I would say, pessimistic and deeply optimistic book, which is quite an achievement. The other part I love about it is, it embodies the motto of this program, which is: It's complicated. There's a lot of humility about what we know and don't know, which I deeply appreciated. Let's start with a line from the book, "The extent of climate change and its impact on the economy and society more generally is far more uncertain than most people think." First, what do you mean by that; and second, why do you think it's true?

Robert Pindyck: Well, first of all, what I mean is

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Robert Pindyck

American economist (born 1945)

Robert Stephen Pindyck (PIN-dyke; born January 5, 1945) is an American economist, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor of Economics and Finance at Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He has also been a visiting professor at Tel-Aviv University, Harvard University, and Columbia University.

Pindyck's teaching and research focuses on market structure, financial economics, environmental, resource, and energy economics, the role of uncertainty on investment decisions and policy formulation, and economic policy generally.

Education

Pindyck grew up in Mamaroneck, New York, and in 1962 graduated from Mamaroneck High School. He then went to M.I.T. where he did his undergraduate work, majoring in physics and electrical engineering, and received his bachelor's degree in 1966.

He went on to do his graduate work at M.I.T., where he completed a Master's degree in electrical engin